Suppose there’s an experienced doctor who has been reading your posts and decides that your various statements and the stories you’ve related over a period of time indicate that you are maladjusted and would benefit from treatment in his locked ward, and that you represent a danger to yourself? I don’t mean “if your behavior on the board had been different”, I mean as it has actually been?
Or, to ask it again, should you only be treated if you actually do something overtly self-destructive or engage in illegally violent crimes against other people?
I agree with you that there is not much that can be done if the person has been judged competent by a court. But overall there is a big difference in Aunt Harriet and someone who is bi-polar. The person with BPD has a malfunction of her or his “decision-maker” – the brain.
Ninetywt, I am not a doctor, but it sounds to be like your sister needs to be hospitalized for help. Have you considered a second opinion?
At one point in my struggle with mental illness, I was given the wrong medication by an extremely poor psychiatrist who had misdiagnosed me. It drove me beserk. I couldn’t form complete sentences and could barely walk. I have never experienced that much pain. The physical pain that I have had from abdominal surgeries did not hold a candle to this mental anquish. All it took was one good psychiatrist and one dose of a medication and my sanity was restored. I know that it is not that easy for most people. One pill just won’t do. But I think your sister needs reevaluation and immediate help.
even sven, I read the article “Manic-Depressive Illness and Creativity” by Kay Redfield Jamison. She certainly has the credentials to know what she is talking about – Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Your summation was very good. But this is also an important point that she makes:
And near the end of the article, this:
But she offers hope when she says that both depression and manic depression are fairly common and very treatable diseases.
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I don’t envy the choices you face.
The article itself is really interesting reading and I’m glad that you mentioned it.
That’s your opinion. The person that you view as having “bipolar disorder” (who may or may not view themselves in the same fashion) may not agree with you. In fact, one of us may think that your decision-maker is on the fritz.
Some of us prefer to be this way. Some of us regard our brains as being more that just our decision-makers, and consider them to be the most quintessential “us” of any subpart we’ve got. (You probably do too). Some of us have just never developed much appreciation for having who we are defined by someone else as a disease.
(It’s different if we don’t like the difference or its consequences and want help, but that’s individually OUR decision).
PS – in case it’s kind of escaped your awareness, part of the reason for many of us having this attitude is that we were your Aunt Harriet (or Guinastasia, or you) until one day a psychiatrist changed that by applying a little label to us.
Many people in the movement were subject to occasional “spells” of being miserable and out of sorts and inclined to seek some therapeutic help now and then, but did not think of ourselves as being non compos mentis, just a bit moody.
Many others did not seek, were not seeing, and had never sought help of any sort remotely akin to “mental health” and yet still inspired someone to think we weren’t OK in the head, often for some pretty outrageous and appallingly narrow reasons.
It could happen to you. To absolutely anybody on this board. (In fact, a tendency to spend hours per week reading this board would be sufficiently indicative of mental disorder in the eyes of some overzealous shrinks, if your worried mom or coworker or ex-husband phoned them about you). And once it has happened once, however briefly, you no longer get to be simply the independent and willful and eccentric Aunt Harriet. Instead you get to be sick Aunt Harriet whose brain dysfunction explains everything she says or does that the people who know her would not have said and done, or, even if they would have, thinks that she should not have said and done.
Yes, it is my opinion and I am not a physician. It is an educated opinion when I am speaking of my own illness. I know little about manic-depression as I stated originally.
And I do know that the article that even sven mentioned refers to both depression and manic depression as diseases. You may prefer that it not be considered a disease. That’s your business. But I have no intention of being dishonest about what I have learned just to accomodate your feelings about it.
I choose “to dance with the man that brung me.” Psychiatry has provided me with relief from some of the worst of my symptoms. It has literally saved my life. My illness is a treatable disease. It is also considered a disorder. You, of course, are free to call it whatever you like.
BTW, no reputable psychiatrist or other physician would make a diagnosis without examining the patient. I don’t think we have to worry about being snatched from SDMB and placed in a hospital against our will just because of something said here.
Zoe, thank you for your concern. Currently my sister is married to a wonderful man who is a big help in guiding her along; ensuring that she takes her meds and goes to the doctor. She’s probably down to about 3 or 4 full cycles a year. (some years she went about 6).
I don’t want to hijack this thread too badly, but concering a second opinion: in the course of her illness she has probably seen 8 to 10 different medical professionals. Part of that is becase she is dirt poor. Paying for Dr. and meds is a big problem, so she turns to gov’t subsidy. Then she is very limited to what Dr.s she can see. The turnover is high and she’s not assured of seeing the same person twice. Transportation becomes a big issue when the gov’t Dr. is in the next county and she’s driving a piece of junk car. We (the family) would like to help but are not financially able to do much.
I think that there is truth to both sides of this debate. AHunter brings up the issue of independence, of free will in deciding your own fate. That’s important to me. OTOH, some folks really are a danger to themselves. The rub comes in the gray area - where it’s really hard to tell if someone’s rights should be curtailed. For borderline cases, it would be extremely difficult for me to have the chore of deciding who should be labeled “mentally ill” and who shouldn’t. I don’t think there are any easy answers here.
i personally doubt genius really makes manic depression worth it.
I do not have the report onhand, but i was reading a magazine article once about Ed Diener & happiness, and it stated that happy people make aroun $12k more a year. They also have better relations with their family & friends
Then i read things like this which show that depression costs alot in productivity.
So if you ask me, being miserable, making less money, having worse relationships and being less productive at your job (assuming the person can hold one) but being able to write good poetry is far from an even trade.
As are you, and there’s no denying that many folks find psychiatric treatment to be akin to a miracle, something that enables them to live and thrive.
As long as you respect my right to define my difference in other terms, believe me I have no intention of depriving you (or others who wish for and benefit from psych meds & other psych treatments) of what works for you.
I wouldn’t expend any energy worrying about that, because you could also get snatched up and placed in a hospital against your will for what you said in a college classroom, or for the “please clean up your mess” sign you posted in the coffee area at work, or for having long or short hair, or for believing or not believing in God, or for wearing your baseball cap backwards – in other words, for damn near anything at all because under the right circumstances anything at all can be considered indicative of your need for treatment.
One of the more famous stories in movement lore is that of Leonard Roy Frank. He was an investment professional of some sort with a six-digit income and then got laid off, and with plenty of money saved up in his personal account he decided to take some time out and get in touch with his roots (Jewish, non-observant parents) and grew his hair out long & with peyot curls and beard, became vegetarian, got immersed in the Torah, etc. His folks came to visit, freaked out that he was doing this instead of seeking a job commensurate with his experience and prior salary, and spoke to their family doctor, who spoke to a psychiatrist he knew, who arranged to meet Leonard Roy Frank and upon doing so had him committed involuntarily, held him for quite some time, had him electroshocked as well as drugged (involuntarily in both cases), and who identified the goals of Frank’s therapy as the dropping of all these recent changes in his life.
Nor is it by any means always family members’ involvement that precipitates these things. Huey Freeman was in a condo or hotel lobby waiting for his girlfriend to come down to meet him and he was dressed fairly downscale for the building, and a person he did not know starting asking him questions about his dress and demeanor and Freeman replied with some variation on “who asked you?” or “I wear what I please” and added that it was a free country, yes? The person to whom he was speaking was a psychiatrist, identified himself as such, informed Freeman that he had problems and that he (the shrink) could help him and that he (Freeman) should come to his clinic for treatment, and when Freeman expressed a lack of interest, the psychiatrist had him committed and held him involuntarily for quite some time and subjected him to forced treatment. I’ve met Freeman (was on a talk-radio presentation with him years ago).
I’m sure many of you would like non-subjective, non-anecdotal references for the occurrence of this kind of thing. So would we, but how does one get objective quantitative stats? Get the states to pass laws requiring psychiatric facilities to report the percentage of involuntary commitments where the patient was not really a believable danger and was just minding his/her own businesss? We know it occurs often enough to fuel a rather angry portion of our movement.
Sort of happened to me. I upset my RA and a couple of other folks on campus with some things I’d written excitedly late at night and xeroxed and handed to them, asking them for their opinions. In my case my commitment was voluntary, but I did not understand that what I was signing was other than an “I agree to talk to the doctor and I do so of my own free will”, there was nothing on that paper that indicated that I would be deprived of shoelaces and belt and placed on a locked ward and held for a couple weeks – I just figured I’d talk to the ‘nice doctor’ for an hour and we’d argue about Freud and potty training and whether my writings were brilliant insights or if instead my excitement over them was misplaced blah blah blah, and then I’d go back to my classes and the folks I’d upset would quit bugging me to talk to the shrinks about it.
PART of the problem is that the psychiatric system doesn’t have a good protocol for admitting and treating someone who is upset and mentally scrambled from horrible things that have happened to them in real life, but that’s where they get taken nonetheless. So people with a nine-year history of childhood sexual abuse and survivors of Bosnian concentration camps get diagnoses bipolar or depressed or schizophrenic. Yet these are supposedly diagnostic categories for people with organic brain dysfunctions – sloppy sloppy sloppy sloppy!!! Indeed, the inter-rater reliabilitiy of psychiatric diagnoses is right around chance level (i.e., if two doctors independently assess a person without knowledge of the findinds of the other, chances are no better than a roll of the dice that the disgnoses will overlap even in broad categories). Small wonder that so many folks in our movement do not believe “mental illness” exists as a genuine physiological phenomenon at all!
I’ve mostly been inclined to think maybe it does, that there is a “difference in wiring” that makes one more likely to end up with the psychiatric diagnostic label, although I also believe that anyone can go into the mental state called “schizophrenia” or the one called “depression” under the right set of circumstances (and no I’m not confusing the blues with depression).
Look, folks. We have been told we are different, and that our difference justifies your doctors treating us in ways we don’t necessarily want to be treated, because our difference is an “illness”. And certainly there are many of us who wish we were normal and also say that it is an illness. In 1961, you would have heard very very similar things being said about (and by) gay people. Would you, in 1961, have said “No, no, it’s a difference and it’s biological in nature and real and all that, but it’s not an inferiority and certainly not a disease, and unless they want to be changed and made ‘normal’, it’s not our place to try to normalize them” – ??
No, I think if you are honest, most of you would say that you would not have been able to say that in 1961. (Some of you clowns will say that’s because you weren’t alive in 1961. You know damn good and well what I mean ;)). You would not have come to think of gay folks in that way until there was a movement which expressed this viewpoint along with some justifiable anger and liberationist outrage.
That’s why we have a movement. Grant that we may enjoy at least a modicum of the success attained by the gay rights movement. I’d like to start with the sophisticated people who constitute this board.
That includes you folks who go to psychiatrists and benefit from what they provide you. We need to come together in such a way that we are not speaking for you and you are not speaking for us. Or rather in such a way that we remember to speak for each other’s contingent when we do speak. I said “the difference becomes a disability only when, on an individual basis, we find it to be one”. When one finds it to be a disability, one is entitled to receive the special care and considerations due to other disabled people, where special provisions must be made in order to maximize their ability to participate in society, but without a mantle of CRIPPLED draped over your head as a consequence. To have autonomy held in the highest regard. To receive treatment in the least restrictive setting. To have access. To have insurance companies told that they cannot deny you the treatments needed to be able to function in society. And to have a consumer voice.
They could. You, and Polycarp and me and Spooje and Manhattan and Anthracite and Exprix and anyone else. Why not? There’s absolutely nothing keeping a psychiatrist from doing so aside from their own perspectives and beliefs as they apply to “mental health and mental illness”. (They do need the concurrence of a second psychiatrist in most jurisdictions, but you’d be amazed at how akin to a rubber-stamp these little professional mutual back-scratching concurrence-evals tend to be. Or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know.)
Guin, why are you getting so defensive? FWIW I’m totally in agreement with AHunter3. I know that last year if I had not been alert and respectful of my partner’s boundaries and rights I could have had him committed. I had a psychologist who was scared of what she saw when she saw the two of us the day he went off the air, it would have been very very easy for me to have him committed. I do believe that if some ‘concerned’ person were to use our posts on the SDMB as support for their POV, it could lead to involuntary hospitalisation.
My kid was nearly committed last year after he had a reaction to zoloft. If he had been, I would have lost parental rights for the period of time he was in the psych unit. I’m not sure how that would have translated in terms of what input I had into his treatment. The psych nurse who first assessed us was pushing to find out what kind of abuse I’d been dishing out to my kid and she really really wanted him in the unit. The doctor decided not to admit him as by the time we waited in the ER, P the E had calmed down considerably. If we had been seen an hour earlier, when he was raving and hearing voices and attacking me physically, relentlessly I’m sure he would have been committed and probably assessed as bipolar.
Ah, but soully, without actually meeting the person in, well, person?
I can’t see it. Now, if you’re saying it’s easy to commit someone, well, I’m sure it is. However, I would think they’d at least have to see me, or have some interest in me. I can’t see some doctor reading my posts at random and suddenly saying I need to be committed.
The thing is, what scares me is that this reminds me of those “Pro-Ana” sites. IANBP, but I am Obsessive-Compulsive. I know what depression is about. Treatment isn’t about changing who I am-it’s about fixing a chemical imbalance in my brain.
So much pain and suffering in this thread. Can make a person sad reading about it. This is a really major problem today. Science has promised to cure depression, but it evades them still.
Maybe a different perspective or course will help. I believe these problems can be helped and even cured through behavioural and/or belief changes. Sometimes the simplest method is the best. When I was working through fear I used affirmations. It took a while, but persistence paid off.
What we try to do with the affirmations is get a larger picture of things. We are like walking around in a maze, thinking there is no way out, but if we can raise our position a bit we can see the whole maze and its exits. That is what affirmations and other studies do. The fear people hold weighs them down, when the fear is released through forgiveness, non-judgement, affirmations, etc., they will just naturally be able to see those exits.
I hope all the posters won’t feel they are above and beyond trying such a simple process. It has been a help to many. Affirmations will take about a month to notice a difference and a year to effect real change. They should be used while reading some good self-help books. If you want things done in this world, you just got to do them yourself, others can point, but you must do the walking.
I wrote the affirmations on the link below and can attest they have helped many, including myself. But you can make up your own as long as they are positive, or search the web. Lots of affirmation sites on the web.
But now suppose you had a roommate who had decided that your immersion in this ‘board’ thing was unhealthy, and that some of the things you’d shared with ‘total strangers’ or ‘the whole friggin world of internet users’ seemed awfully risky and self-destructive (cuz like isn’t that how people get killed and raped these days? stalkers from the internet, right?), and your concerned roommate contacted a university-affiliated psychiatrist and gave the psychiatrist the URL? Possibly a different story.
Even then they’d generally have to meet you first, although they might have their mind already made up.
I don’t want to be guilty of exaggerating the risks and dangers here. (A bit of unnecessary painting of lilies that would be!)
Would you suggest this way of coping to someone with diabetes? a brain tumor? Parkinson’s Disease?
letkatt, I believe that your suggestions come for your compassion and your experiences. I am familiar with affirmations and there may be much to be said for them. Learning to stop the negative self-talk has also been helpful in coping with ups and downs in general. I believe in positive thinking and in working on my attitudes.
But in my situation we are talking about a commonly terminal illness. Sometimes I am not even “present” in any mental way. We (my husband, my psychiatrist, and I) refer to it as “going away.” That’s sometimes what I do when I am having a bout of major depression. (Most of the time I have chronic, low grade depression that allows me to have more contol.)
During major depression, I don’t “feel” much of anything. Just numbness.
Many of us who have the illness known as “depression” hope that some day people will stop telling us to cheer up and actually read about what depression really is.
I wish they would change the name so that people don’t just think we are just down in the dumps or depressed about something.
AHunter3, I understand better now where you are coming from. Both of us would like to destigmatize our situations. We seem to come at it from opposing directions, but at least I hear what you are saying now.
Hospitalization has been a positive experience for me except in the 1960’s. I am grateful that they take away those things with which I might hurt myself. I can just “be” for a while until I am able to actually think. And other patients are so kind and funny to talk with. But I can understand how it is not a good situation for those who are getting poor care or who do not want help.
BTW, I have not had to be hospitalized since June of 1995. I have terrific support and understanding from my husband. Short monthly sessions with a psychiatrist and medications have been a God-send.
